According to the critics, the author, whose vitality is intact at 90 years old, is outstanding for his capacity to write poetry with reality seen as a whole that includes daily life mixed with the strange.

Accustomed to work with words in a battle he considers these are the weapons that arm a poem whose destination is not decided by illumination or inspiration but of craft.

"Craft and more craft, is the game of poetry, the great incurable game: enchantment and condemnation. No one who has words can be cured," he affirmed in the opening speech of the Casa de las Americas, 2008, Literary Prize.

"Craft and more craft," he added, and not "illumination or inspiration as the dimwitted say."

At this time in his life, when he has already won the battle of words with imagination and courage, Rojas feels as if he lets language write for him, in his transit through courses of eroticism, love and existential anxieties.

Professor in Chilean and foreign universityies, diplomat in Cuba and the Popular Republic of China during the 60s of last century; exiled during the Pinochet coup, he has inserted in his work a universal and deep vision of the human being and his circumstances.

Cervantes Award of Literature and the Reina Sofia Poetry award; National of Literature in his country, the Jose Hernandez Award of Argentina and the Octavio Paz in Mexico, Gonzalo Rojas assures that he is reliving his childhood.

(PL)